And there are warranties to consider.
Nowhere near double, unfortunately - more like 30% on average. And some games just don’t support it very well at all and you don’t see any gain. It can also introduce other problems. SLI should never be attempted on the low end as a price/performance measure… SLI is really only useful for people who like to spend a whole lot on hardware to have the best performance. I see some people thinking they’re getting better value with 2 low end cards instead of one mid end (for example 2 8600GTs instead of one 8800GT) and it’s just a really bad idea.
In some strange coincidence, my friend called me up recently to ask why fallout 3 wouldn’t run on his system - and he had exactly the same thing, a dell 2400. After looking over the stats I told him there was pretty much no way it was going to work and he’d just have to buy/build a new one. Now is a good time to buy - you can build a very good system for cheap.
How did you size the PS? Seems pretty brawny.
I was thinking of future proofing as much as possible, this way whether you went for more drives/ram in the future and specifically if in a year you decide to go SLI and pick up another GTX 260 for $100, you wouldn’t have to worry about the PSU. It made sense, specially at that price point. Alternatively you could go for lower wattage (just make sure you keep those 12 v rail amps as high as possible) and a more efficient power supply, which should save you a bit in your powerbill.
That’s a pretty good PSU calculator. More important than raw wattage is how the wattage breaks down on each rail. 750 is more than most systems will need. More important is the quality - get something by corsair, seasonic, ocz, PC power & cooling in the 500-600w range and you’ll be more than covered.
As far as Kinthalis’ recommendations go, I’d say get an E8400 for $165 instead (most people are better served by a faster clocked dual core than a slower quad core).
Don’t get a 1 TB drive unless you need the space and can’t fit any additional hard drives in your case - the price per gig has a premium and you lose a whole lot of data at once. this drive has an outstanding price/performance/size ratio.
GTX 260 is probably overkill for your needs. Something like this is an excellent value - especially that model specifically, because XFX is a very good company and COD 4 is an awesome bundle. It should be more than adequate for your needs. ATI’s 4570 or 4670 series might suit you well too.
As for the motherboard, I’d stay away from Nvidia Intel chipsets, especially for non-enthusiasts. They’ve got some quirks to them. The only reason to get them in most cases is SLI support and you really don’t want to mess with that anyway. Get a P35 or P45 board. this is the motherboard I use - it’s absolutely excellent. You wouldn’t get use out of the more advanced features, but it’s a rock solid board.
Right, Senor Beef has some good suggestions, I was trying to stretch what I assumed was $1,000 budget given the build you posted. SenorBeef’s build will save you more money.
Generally lines up well with my needs…
I looked at the EVGA 123-YW-E175-A1 LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 750i, which after rebate is only $5 more than the one you recommend, but I definitely don’t want to deal with anything quirky the first time I do this. Also, what are the advanced features for the one you recommend? (Also, it doesn’t seem to have front-panel ports.)
My objective is not to keep cost to a bare minimum but rather to have a machine that will be mid- to high-performance by today’s standards (e.g., frequent photo and video editing), defy becoming obsolete as long as possible, be upgradeable, not require constant tweaking just to keep it running. I don’t mind spending money but I hate wasting it.
I have the 780i mobo and have had no problems with it. It’s true that the last chipset had some serious RAID problems, as well as problems with it the hardware firewall, but I don’t recall anything specific about the 700’s.
The video editing, and specially encoding will be greatly benefited by a quad core CPU. Almost all video editing/encoding software I know of will happily take advantage of multiple cores. The whole enterprise is very parallel computing friendly. Although it’s true, that right now at least, games will benefit more from 2 more capable cores than 4 less capable ones. (although this can be mitigated a bit with some overclocking).
If you want to keep your system in the mid, mid-high range for as long as possible whilst delaying upgrades, then obviously, the more you spend the more you will delay, and the longer you will remain in that high end marker able to play latest releases at high resolutions with max graphics settings.
Right now the 260 is the best bet for you due to a good price for your particular budget (if your budget was smaller I’d definitely got for 8800 gt or 9800 gt). OC that bad boy and it’ll perform better than it’s more expensive sibling the 280.
With regard to graphics cards, I’d suggest a Radeon 4850 or Geforce 9600 as being decent mid-range cards.
BTW 8 available USB ports isn’t a lot.
What do you do with nine USB ports?
-FrL-
By front panel ports you mean things like front USB ports and audio connectors, right? It has those. The “advanced features” I mentioned are mostly things geared towards tweakers/enthusiasts/overclockers - there are pages of obscure bios settings (which you won’t have to worry about, everything is set on auto unless you want to change it) - as well as some physical features geared towards that such as multiphase digital PWM, capacitor cooling, high end solid state caps, and stuff along those lines. It may have changed by now, but as of the time I bought it, the world record core 2 duo quad overclock was set using that board (5.9ghz IIRC).
In all likelyhood you won’t be using most of that, but you still benefit from the solid hardware design. For $130 it’s probably the best price/performance out there. I was going to recommend the gigabyte ep35 boards as a minimal but quality (and cheap) board, those were very popular, but newegg doesn’t carry them anymore. The closest thing newegg has is here but I’m not familiar with that board specifically and it’s pricier.
I last owned Nforce2 and Nforce3 boards, and liked them, so by default when I was building this system I was leaning towards Nvidia boards. But the consensus was to stay away from them unless you needed SLI support.
You’d probably be well served by any P35 or P45 chipset board from DFI, Asus, Abit, or Gigabyte (except their sub-$60 ones).
You won’t be able to upgrade your CPU much because we’re at the end of a generation. Nahelem is coming in a few months (I think they call it i7 now) and it’s a different architecture - you’d need to upgrade your motherboard. That said, today’s CPUs are extremely fast and will likely last a while. I wouldn’t wait to upgrade - the first few months of i7 availability is going to be at a price premium, it’ll be a while before they’re available for low/mid range level prices.
I can only go by experience in saying the P35 boards are solid and unproblematic and benchmarks generally indicate slightly faster than the Nvidia chipsets. The boards are also cheaper.
I agree, if video related tasks will be a common use for you, get a quad core.
Well, sort of. If you’re willing to overclock a quad then you’d be willing to overclock a dual, so an OC’d quad vs stock dual isn’t really a fair comparison. Duals overclock better both because there’s far less heat to deal with and because you’re held back by the slower of two cores, rather than the slowest of 4. Most Q6xxx series quads top out around 3.2 ghz, with some getting up to 3.6 (not sure how the Q8xxx performs), whereas my e8400 can do 3.8 with barely any effort and 4.2+ with some pushing.
I’m not totally up to date with the graphics war, but I get the impression that ATI has the better offerings in the 260’s price range.
Worth reading is Ars Technica’s builders guides
Brian
Absolutely, the Pentium north chips are stable and very good performers, I don’t disagree.
Whoa! You got the 8400 up to 4.2? Air? What’s the multipler on that? I got Q9550 and have it oc’ed to 3.4. Won’t go higher on air. 
Not since the 260 came down to the $220 price range. ATI has the 4870 which is great too, but it falls behind on a few benchmarks.
Geforce 9600GT isn’t even close to the performance of a Radeon HD 4850. The 4850 outperforms the 9800GT (the 9600’s much bigger brother). The 9600GT is meant to compete with the HD 3870, and you can see how well that does here
Considering you can get a 9800GT for only ~$100 right now, there’s really no reason to not have that as a minimum for a gaming computer.
I agree that 9800GT (or 8800 GTS G92 which is basically the same thing) should be considered as the minimum - they’re only $100-125 and give good performance.
Yeah, that’s not uncommon. I’m doing that with a Xigmatek 1283 with a bad application of AS5 (I could probably get better cooling by repasting/reseating my heatsink but I haven’t wanted to bother). The multiplier on the E series chips are top-locked meaning you can’t go above 9, so 4.2 is 466*9. To get it to 3.8 requires a very modest bump of… IIRC .025mv, or whatever 2 notches are in my bios… 4.2 requires closer to .15. I got too lazy/disinterested in pushing it beyond 4.2 because I’m not really CPU bottlenecked in anything I do.
I’m getting in a little over my head here, I won’t be screwing around with overclocking.
I think some people thought I had a budget; I don’t have a budget as such but retail machines in the $1000-$1500 range more than suit my needs and more than that would just be wasted on me. I’d be willing to spend the same range on parts but only if the power doesn’t far outrun what I need (e.g., SLI would be overkill).
I started the thread by noting I’m not a gamer, but I would like to be able to play an occasional game without worrying about bumping my head like I am now.
And I am finding out that there’s a whole world of BIY out there that I never knew about.
You know, I kind of miss the days when guys would hang out at the strip mall comparing carburetors, headers, and glass packs. Computers are the new hot rods. 
The spec page listed “rear panel ports” but not front panel ports. Maybe it’s just the way they list things.